domain:forecasting.substack.com
DirtyWaterHotDog
23hr ago
Sorry, saw this late. But hope you had fun.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
23hr ago
Well fair, that we have.
Though then again, sitting in between France and Czechia, we had both the worst and the best brewers in the world right next to us, and every opportunity to learn what to do and what not to do.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23hr ago
Silver Stars: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 8 by David North.
FtttG
1d ago
I have a collection of the Father Brown stories and read the first one, "The Blue Cross", during the week. It was pretty good.
Planning to read "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang tomorrow.
JulianRota
1d ago
I do live in New York, but just saw this. Wouldn't have been able to make it anyways, I just flew back in from Europe last night at like 10:30pm.
I was trying to tell her that, at some point, I'd known some Visual Basic, but that was so fucking long ago and I was so inebriated that I couldn't remember the name. That's up there, with icky programming languages. Might as well claim I know Scratch.
She might pattern match you to being a high-earning finance bro who doesn't care for nerdy things like programming.
I'd already told her I was in the notoriously lucrative profession of psychiatry, so a bit late for that. I'll have to see if Count is hiring.
When single moms start looking "sensible," it was time to call it a night two hours ago.
You're not... wrong. In my defense, I had never met the ladies before, and they didn't come join us with kids in tow. Them being single mothers was an aspect I only gleaned much later. And if I do write the story up, you will see why the word "sensible" is appropriate, as a relative modifier if nothing else.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
If it makes you feel any better, Britain won the last two world wars and is arguably no better off. You probably have the better beer, at the risk of starting a third war.
Sloot
1d ago
The strongest argument I have ever encountered for alcoholism is not “you will get drunk” but “your life will suddenly become narratively compelling.”
Doing it for the story, not the glory.
She was also a programmer. She told me her favorite language was Pascal. I told her mine was Python. She seemed satisfied.
I enjoy the automatic understanding among men that not even choice of programming language is safe from potential hypergamy, so one has to assess the female reaction afterward to see if the ick was induced. Python's a basic but safe choice, given its ubiquity across domains and industries nowadays.
I wonder what answer would run the highest probability of ick-induction in a manic pixie programming girl. Excel? SAS? SQL? An actual but boomer-coded programming language like COBOL?
The answer of Excel might be so-bad-it's-good, if you deliver it with grinning giga-Chad energy while being attractive and not unattractive. She might pattern match you to being a high-earning finance bro who doesn't care for nerdy things like programming.
meeting two single moms, one sensible and the other not
When single moms start looking "sensible," it was time to call it a night two hours ago.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Good roads that are perpetually down for maintenance, hot women that are as rare as in any country and aging out of the demographic vase anyways, and cheap booze that we can't afford for all the taxes and have no time to drink because we prefer packing our free time with as much responsibility as possible.
Yeah we're the best country in the world and the greatest nation to ever grace the face of the Earth, but man does it feel godforsaken when you've lived here all your life and seen it decline. We're too good for this shit. And what, why - just because we lost two world wars, wasted our wealth, became world champions in bureaucracy, stopped breeding and all the while imported half our biomass in foreigners? History isn't fair!
And then there's the places that do Germany even better than Germany. I should've never visited Switzerland or Japan; just makes me feel bad when I see absolute shitholes like Stuttgart or Berlin. I suspect that if I were ever to visit Singapore, you'd have to force me bodily back onto the plane.
The Germany I love and the Germany that will make it to the end of the 21st century (or just the middle) are not the same country.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
It's especially useful when you're writing reusable framework code, e.g. your UI library will probably have something like register_callback(Function f, Widget w) so you can perform action f whenever button w is clicked. But if you're just writing "app" code as opposed to "framework" code it may not come up as often.
5434a
1d ago
Just finished James Clavell's King Rat. Have read enough Clavell now that I can pick out his personal writing tropes.
Now skipping through Nancy McWilliams' Psychoanalytic Diagnosis after seeing it repeatedly mentioned around the SSC-sphere.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
It blew my mind when I first learned about it too!
In some sense this is the same sort of mental gestalt shift that is at the basis of all scientific thought, and is therefore a useful experience for everyone to undergo.
What if a function were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of operations, you can pass it around, access its properties, etc.
What if the human mind/body were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of physical laws, etc.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It's a pity that Reddit is so solidly entrenched. They still have room for enshittification, unfortunately.
I don't think that Digg ever had nearly as many users. And the bigger ongoing issue is that most Reddit-clones are seeded by weird people, which makes them off-putting. Some might even say the same for this place, though I obviously think more highly of it.
Once they've finished cracking down on power mods, the ability to organize against them will be largely gone.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Implying that "God-forsaken" narrows it down! You guys are lucky that you have good roads, hot women and cheap booze.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
several desi & European
"self_made_human is an outlier and should not be considered"
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I don't really get it either, and it's not something that's worth policing 99% of the time. We eventually crack down on blatant single-issue posting, especially if it is obnoxious, but that's a high bar.
We have a button to collapse threads. We have a block button. The last is a nuclear option, but the former? Just use that to skip past what you don't care for.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Leftist quirk? Yes. But your friend appears to be slightly mentally ill. Some here would claim that one implies the other, I'm not that partisan.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Less prurient, but it has my vote. I'll being it up with the other mods.
Mushguffler
1d ago
"I very specifically use the term pregnant people, and very specifically added my pronouns at the end of my resignation letter to make the point
This sort of use of "specifically" really annoys me. A friend of a friend does that, and I can't stand it -- he's one of those people who fancies himself a real magickal person -- magic with a k -- who like "summons a speed spirit" to make his DoorDash order come quicker. He specifically annoys me.
Is this a leftist quirk? (I don't really care, but this is a post for questions, so I thought I ought to add a question)
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
It's interesting to ask why it should be bothersome when you feel that someone is "monopolizing" the site with posts you don't like. It certainly is bothersome, I won't deny that. But it's not clear why it should be. The site has an in principle unlimited amount of server space. It's not a zero sum game. One person posting a thread you don't like doesn't prevent you or other people from posting threads that are more to your liking.
There are certain popular genres of threads here that bore me to tears (mainly the policy wonk posts, and the posts that get into obsessive minutiae regarding current events). But I know that by the same token, there are people who hate the types of posts that I like to produce and read as well (borderline schizophrenic free associative rants about philosophy and psychology). If I start harping on people for writing posts I don't like, then I know that they can just turn that around and say "well we don't like what you're trying to turn themotte into either". So I generally just try to keep my mouth shut when there's a post I don't like and I just ignore it or collapse the thread.
I suppose that although the site in principal has space for an unlimited number of threads, it only really has space for one dominant culture, and in this sense it is more zero sum. The fear could be that threads you don't like will attract the types of posters that you don't like, which will over time shift the culture in a direction that makes the site less valuable to you.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
tl;dr: 4.5 stars for books 1 and 2, 4 stars for books 3 to 9, 3.5 stars for book 10
Several other reviews say that the story falls off after the first antagonist is introduced in book 3, and I'm inclined to agree with them. For me, the first tipping point is in chapter 122 (halfway through book 3), when the protagonist, who previously made a big deal of keeping his word, rather egregiously breaks a promise.
Specifically: In chapter 121, he promises a reward of 100,000 points to whoever snitches on a traitor. But in chapter 122 he decides to pay only the first installment of that reward before having the snitch secretly killed. In chapter 128, it is confirmed that the snitch has been killed. Compare that to chapter 70 in book 2 ("I don't lie. My word is my currency.") and chapter 46 in book 1 ("A deal is a deal. I always keep my word. I may be a murdering asshole, but I don't lie.").The second tipping point occurs in chapter 463 (early in book 10), when the protagonist imposes a "Kafkaesque" punishment on an antagonist who cannot be killed. Maybe I'm overreacting, but it reminds me too much of the Sasuke poop incident in Chunin Exam Day, which was a definite marker of that story's downturn. So I've stopped reading there.
(As part of the English problems, I guess I should also mention that the protagonist's dialog is written rather weirdly. My mental image of him always is a bearded Russian in his 40s, rather than the clean-shaven American in his 30s that he's supposed to be. But that's a minor issue.)
By my estimate we have 3 or 4 desis here. (between what I suspect are alts and mains), but most of us are either outside India or will soon be outside India.
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